Very Near the Line

An Autobiographical Sketch of Education and Its Politics in the Thatcher Years

During the eleven years of Margaret Thatchers premiership, education in England was transformed by her determination to reorganise the state sector along public school lines and, in doing so, to remove local councils from the key role they had always played in the national system. Throughout this time, Donald Naismith was the Director of Education for three of them where he frequently came, in Lord Dennings words, very near the line in pursuing policies central to Mrs Thatchers revolution but opposed by both the right as well as the left wings of the education establishment. In this description of the impact of Mrs Thatchers policies on local government, he draws attention to the extent to which she unwillingly depended on local councils themselves to provide the practical means of putting her reforms into effect among them Richmonds league tables, Croydons national curriculum and standardised testing, and Wandsworths specialist schools. Donald Naismith argues that Margaret Thatchers reforms would have made more headway had she enlisted the cooperation of local councils instead of fatally weakening them and predicts that a new, more powerful version of local government will, paradoxically, need to be invented if her education market strategy now gathering momentum is to succeed.